14 October 2013 6:10 PM

There is nothing more dispiriting than an English middle-class audience, especially one in the gentler, more prosperous parts of the country. They calmly believe all kinds of ideas which menace, most profoundly, the lives they lead.

Oxford, I think, is worst of all - though I once faced a roomful of supposedly crusty Tories in Windsor, all of whom had been brainwashed (presumably by newspapers they erroneously thought to be conservative) into believing that cannabis should be decriminalised. That was when I realised how bad it has got. The word ‘demoralised’ now has a rather weak meaning, weaker than I intend to convey. But forget its modern connotations, and use it literally, and I can think of no other which so exactly describes what has happened to this class of person. Perhaps ‘corrupted’ conveys the strength of what I wish to say, but that too has a different meaning in current usage.

The majority of the audience who came to a rather odd debate about drugs at Cheltenham on Saturday night were, for instance, immovably committed to a policy on the subject which will inevitably destroy the efficient, clean, prosperous and ordered society whose benefits they currently enjoy. At one point they actually applauded a nice middle-aged lady, not for her sensible remarks on trying to deter her own children from drug taking, but because of her confession that she had herself used illegal drugs in the past.

After the discussion, just one person bought my book. It was one more than I expected, given the waves of scorn and dislike which had beaten upon me and on my doughty ally, Kathy Gyngell (who is much nicer than I am, but that didn’t make any difference. An enemy of drug liberalisation is, to such people, an apostle of repressive reactionary wickedness). Students, I‘m pleased to say, have much more open minds on this issue than my fellow-members of the Sixties generation.

My own generation’s view on most subjects is, I think, usually a manifestation of what I have decided to call Selfism.

This is nothing to do with Professor Will Self, whose name, after all, is not his own fault.

Selfism is the real force behind the undoing of our society. I sought for years for some sort of coherent theoretical explanation for our multifaceted cultural, social and moral revolution. I found Fabians hiding in the rhododendrons, Gramscians lurking in the pantry, Euro-Communists behind the curtains. I even chased the Frankfurt School though a long labyrinth of polysyllables, and discovered Wilhelm Reich, George Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse doing something naughty in the Orgone Box.

They’re all there, these people. They had or have influence, even power. They exist or existed. They all work (or worked) , night and day, for the overthrow of bourgeois capitalist morality, etc etc. And then there are the many female liberationists bashing away at the traditional family, and all the legions of equality merchants and open-borders enthusiasts, and of course the militant atheists, who hate God, claim he doesn’t exist, and want to stop us telling our children about Him, in case he does exist.

But I don’t think they have a High Command. There’s no eye-patched villain in combat gear, in a hollowed-out mountain, directing their operations in sinister whispers as she strokes a white cat. Some of them understand what’s going on better than others. Some are mere instruments, too dim to have any idea what they are doing. Most have little idea of the significance of what they and do, beyond their immediate surroundings. They’re in all the political parties, including in dear old Dad’s Army. Only one invariable test exposes them for what they are.

It’s that the policy they support has a self-interested aspect, based upon the idea that each of us is autonomous in his or her own body, and that, as they always militantly rasp ‘Nobody has the right to tell me what to do with my own body’.

It’s an interesting rule, and it appeals readily to the unimaginative, which in this age is an awful lot of people, most of us having had our imaginations removed or de-activated in infancy, by TV sets, unceasing background noise and computer games. And if any feeble shoots of imagination still remain, they’ve been shrivelled up by the conformism of a society in which remorseless fashion polices speech and thought. And, as most of us know, a thought that can’t be spoken is like a plant without sunlight. It will shrivel and die.

The best instance of this militant Selfism at work is the strange, ferocious campaign which calls for abortion to be more or less wholly unrestricted. It’s logically barmy. If you’re sovereign over your own body, then you can’t be sovereign over anyone else’s – but abortion is the violent destruction of someone else’s sovereign, autonomous body. Rather than admit this obvious difficulty, they pretend that the other person’s body is somehow not really a person or a body, but they must know as they say it that this is a slippery dodge. Actually, many of the supporters of this campaign hesitate about taking their position to its logical conclusions, which are, of course, post-birth infanticide and the euthanasia of the gravely ill, its limits defined by the needs of the ‘community’ as embodied by the state.

Hitlerian Germany’s flirtation with eugenics and the systematic killing of the mentally ill has, for the moment, discredited a view that was once common among enlightened left-wing folk. But I wonder how long this inhibition will last, especially as the problem of the aged gaga parent, sitting on (and consuming) a large inheritance, persists among us.

In any case, let us return to the real problem . It was the strange association of the free abortion campaign with feminism that alerted me to it. Now, it is clear that in China and India, and bit by bit in this country, babies are being aborted in increasing numbers purely because they are female. China, where I have observed it in action, give some indication of how things may develop here, as people realise it is wholly legal, and , what is more, uncondemned by fashionable opinion (http://dailym.ai/1alaiwz ) .

This is blatant sex discrimination of the crudest and most indefensible type. Anyone who was genuinely concerned for female equality would denounce it in the strongest terms. Yet, from most of the extensive and uninhibited chorus of articulate female (and supposedly feminist) voices in the media, politics and the academy, there has been no such protest.

I think this is one of the most fascinating collective silences of modern times. It demands an explanation. Here is an absolute breach of all they purport to hold most dear. *And they will not attack it*. I’ve given them weeks and weeks to do so. A tiny few have mumbled a bit. But most have remained quiet.

Therefore these people cannot in fact be feminists in principle. Their concerns have another explanation. They want, for their individual selves, cultural, moral and if possible legal assistance in climbing career ladders and entering professions. But it ends with them, individually. They have no unbreakable solidarity with other members of their sex, who will never sit as judges, get into Parliament, or into a boardroom , or even a newsroom , because they were dismembered in the womb for being girls.

I can see no way out of this. It is one of the most classic hypocrisies of our times.

In which case, what is the rest of their position about? Is their attitude to marriage to do with female equality, as such, or with the freedom to earn a big salary? The same surely goes for the state-funded childcare, the maternity leaves and the rest.

Note that in the current era of cheap servants from abroad, the salaried mother who works outside the home is uniquely able to get her domestic chores done by paid strangers. But it is not so long ago that such cheap servants were not available, and an inconveniently-timed baby was a career disaster. Step forward the abortion clinic. Maybe this will be so again, before long.

But if a baby can be got rid of on such a thin pretext (supposedly a threat to the mother’s mental health, when in fact it’s a menace to her income) then it is plain that the same law must allow the killing of a baby for being the wrong sex. No law could be devised which allowed what might crudely be called career-preserving abortions, and yet forbade abortions on the grounds of sex.

If you want to protect unborn girls from girl-hating parents, then you must make abortion very difficult, or well-nigh impossible, for everyone. And the alleged feminists, actually Selfists, can intuitively see that.

That is why they have been silent.

And then you must ask yourself how it was that abortion on demand ever became a feminist desire. What exactly does it have in common with campaigns for women to vote, to have full property rights, to stand for parliament, to be allowed into universities and the professions?

The answer is that it has nothing in common with these demands at all, as it has now absolutely proved, which is why I can consistently support all these demands, and absolutely oppose abortion.

But Selfism cannot campaign under its own true colours, which are stained with blood and other horrible things. It has to dress up in nobler garments, and appropriate the clothes of truly moral campaigns, to advance its ends.

So the abortionist campaigns as a feminist; the drug liberaliser campaigns as the friend of civil liberties; the adulterer campaigns as the rescuer of the woman trapped in an unhappy marriage; and so on.

And above all there is the person who hates the idea of real, absolute morality, who fears that there may, after all, be a deep, unalterable law which condemns his or her desires and which – mourning even over a fallen sparrow – cries out in terrible grief at an aborted baby. That person furiously asserts that there is no God, and no such law, and angrily denounces those who believe there is.

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30 September 2013 4:17 PM

It is very sad, but some people may actually be influenced by the argument that a UKIP vote at the 2015 election will put ‘Red Ed’ into Downing Street. Of course it will. That’s the whole point of doing it, a negative action misrepresented by expressing it as a positive one. You can’t keep Tweedledumber out without putting Tweedledumb in. There is no facility for electing no government at all (though given their performances lately, whyever not?). You do it because you really don’t much care who wins, and why should you? You want to punish someone.

I , for instance, am not one of those who say there’s absolutely no difference between the parties. I actually think that Labour wouldn’t have dared to smash up the armed forces the way the Tories have done. It’s a sort of Nixon and China point, not a moral plus for Labour. But it’s a fact. And I am astonished that the intervention of two ex-soldiers at the Tory conference on Sunday did not get more coverage than it did.

Did those present not see that they were witnessing a gigantic earthquake of Krakatoan proportions? A Tory Defence Secretary heckled by moustachioed and medal-hung ex-soldiers, for cutting the armed forces? And this in the days of supposedly total security, when all dissenting opinion is sniffed out and excluded, and none but the vetted get within a furlong of the conference hall? Lucky for the Tories that these decent old coves went quietly. If you want to know why the Tories are bound to lose, then there’s your answer. If they can alienate such people, they’ve alienated their deep core. Yet the sketch-writers seemed more interested in a tawdry stall of Thatcher knick-knacks.

I was reminded of the curious events at a Tory rally in Blackpool in October 1958, recalled at length in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (first published as ‘The Broken Compass’). At this event, supporters of the League of Empire Loyalists were violently ejected from the hall for heckling Harold Macmillan. They were expressing or defending positions (on immigration and the winding up of the empire) similar to views that had quite recently been expressed by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street.

Which raises the amusing question of the Tory party’s incessant parading of Sir Winston as their exemplar and hero for the past 60 years or so, and conjures up the mental picture of the old boy being summarily ejected from a modern Tory Party conference by stone-faced stewards with plastic badges, to be handed over to ‘Security’ staff and then passed on to modern police officers with pepper sprays, Tasers and the usual paraphernalia of baseball caps, sub-machine guns, visible handcuffs and flexi-batons. Never in the field of human conflict, I’ll say.

Several distinguished journalists - no friends of the Empire Loyalists (no more am I) - were appalled at what happened to the Empire Loyalists on that long-ago Blackpool Day. They perhaps didn’t realise the real significance of it.

The Tories have always been ruthless in the pursuit of office, but the late Reginald Bosanquet, then a reporter for Independent Television News, testified later in court that the violence used against the Blackpool hecklers had been ‘excessive’. So did the late Bernard Levin, who said he had seen one of the hecklers marched into a room by uniformed stewards, whereupon ‘I heard cries and the door was repeatedly banged from the other side. When he came out he was very distressed’. Mr Levin also testified that the man was bleeding heavily from the nose, and his shirt was torn. This was, in a way, the Tories’ version of Labour’s far gentler ejection of Walter Wolfgang from their conference many years later. But it is largely forgotten because nobody much liked the Empire Loyalists, whereas old Walter was quite appealing.

This sort of thing really cannot happen now, thanks to TV, and I must admit, thanks to the Internet, which would spread images of it around the country so quickly that it would be politically impossible.

But I think it showed, even then, the truth – that the Tories had entirely accepted, by 1958, the Fabian reordering of Britain between 1945 and 1951, not to mention this country’s epochal defeat and humiliation by the USSR and the USA at Tehran, Yalta and Bretton Woods, and were prepared to enforce the change with all necessary ruthlessness.

Now they have entirely accepted the Blairite (ie EuroCommunist and Gramscian) reordering of the country between 1990 (the true beginning of Blairism) and 2010, and the German reordering of Europe since 1989 . And Michael Howard (the man laughably believed by some to be a ‘right-winger’, who created David Cameron and hugely centralised power in his party) and David Cameron himself were prepared to go to amazing lengths to reinforce this.

Their greatest enemies, in this project, are the loyal members and voters of their own party, who must be bullied, cajoled or otherwise persuaded into voting for and supporting governments which are hateful to them. The loathing is mutual, which is why I recently said on television that David Cameron did many of the things he does because he hates his own party. Of course he does. It's his job.

There’s only one answer to people who are wholly ruthless in the pursuit of office – and that’s to deny them office with equal ruthlessness. They will suffer far more from this than the voters will suffer from putting the ‘wrong’ party in office. Who (on either side of the political divide) thinks there has been any vast difference between the Coalition or the Blair-Brown, in their effects on daily life, living standards or human freedom? Or foreign policy? Or anything else?

Those who didn’t like the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and so abstained or voted for other parties in 1992, were not so thick that they didn’t grasp what their actions would bring about. Lo, John Major, perhaps the most unlikely victor in British electoral history, became Prime Minister. It wasn't that anyone much actually wanted him. It was that they didn't want the other one (much the same process put Ted Heath into Downing Street in 1970, after the famous 'unpopularity contest' between him and the by-then-discredited Harold Wilson).And the Labour Party was, for good or ill, forced to change, into something rather like John Major.

UKIP voters (and if you feel you must vote, which I don't, that’s the way to do it) can hardly believe that Nigel Farage is the national future. Even Mr Farage (and all credit to him for grasping it) knows that is not going to happen. But he also knows he can do a lot of mischief, and his latest plan, to offer individual Tories UKIP support, is very mischievous. It's absolutely not a pact(which would destroy UKIP) . But it could force a lot of blowhard 'Eurosceptic' Tories to show what they're really made of, or more likely what they aren't made of.

These UKIP supporters may genuinely hope to change the Tories, though the only way to change them is to destroy them utterly and replace them with almost anything else, perhaps a blob of plasticine. I mean, anything, anything would be better than this intellectually and morally bankrupt rump of deeply unattractive, ignorant and not-very-bright persons. Game of Thrones? More like a Game of Drones.

There’s a good chance that a Tory failure in 2015, especially if combined with Scotland voting to stay in the Union, will bring about the long-needed split and collapse of the Conservative Party. Scottish secession is in fact David Cameron’s only remaining hope of a Westminster majority. I am baffled and flummoxed by the number of commentators and politicians who claim, with straight faces, that the Tories can win an absolute majority in May 2015. On what polls are they basing this? It is virtually unknown for a governing party to increase its vote or share of the vote after five years in government – the March 1966 election, in which Labour got its absolute majority, followed a sort of probationary period of 18 months in which the voters decided (foolishly) that Harold Wilson was to be trusted after all. The 1983 Tory election triumph was brought about by the Falklands, and the 1987 one by the Alliance splitting the left utterly.

UKIP voters, many of whom feel as I do that the whole purpose of their vote should be to punish the Tories, need to go a step further. They should seek to destroy the Tories, so knocking down the great wall of flannel and conventional wisdom that keeps this country from discussing its own future, or influencing it. So what if ‘Red Ed’ gets in? Or a Lib-Lab coalition? Will you really be able to tell the difference? But five or ten years afterwards, we might have a proper British government again, which quite possibly may not happen, but will certainly never happen as long as the Tories survive.

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01 May 2013 2:59 PM

This being May Day, my thoughts turn to the curious celebration that I witnessed there in Moscow’s Red Square in 1991, as a privileged Western reporter with a ticket for the enclosure just next to Lenin’s tomb (I still have that ticket, along with the matching pass that got me into the previous November’s Revolution Day parade, which turned out to be the last ever celebration of Lenin and Trotsky's 1917 putsch). Unlike the November event - a stern, menacing, militaristic display - May Day was an occasion of enforced jollity, compulsory balloons, collectivist simpering and general drivel. It was what I had in mind when I compared it to the Olympic opening ceremony in a column last year.

As keen readers will know, it was that comparison that embroiled me in a long struggle with the BBC, now finished though not really concluded. My contention, that the BBC has an institutional bias against people of my opinions, still seems to me to be under examination. I’ll let you know.

But there’s an underlying point here, too. What I wrote meant more to me than it meant to most readers, because of my direct and privileged experience. In this case, that experience was one of the most powerful things that ever happened to me (the others are more personal and private, and I won’t discuss them here, with the exception of a bad road accident I had through my own fault in 1969, which introduced me simultaneously to actual physical terror for my own life, and to blazing intense pain just short of blackout), my appointment and accreditation as Moscow Correspondent of a national newspaper.

I sometimes wonder if I should try harder to convey what a transforming thing this was. With a few months’ notice, I undertook an intense course in the Russian language which, thanks to a superb teacher, left me able to bluster in that difficult tongue to this day, but not to understand most of what Russians said to me, nor to be able to read the language in books or newspapers.

Next, I had to find, in that vast and clangourous city, an office and a place to live for my family, who were to join me as soon as possible. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ the place was full of foreign journalists seeking the same thing, Official accommodation had long ago been allocated. I arrived by train on a lovely June day at the White Russia railway station, to be met by a group of Russian friends and acquaintances who did what they could ( and it was a lot) to help, but (after I had spent enough time in a costly hotel and then exhausted the hospitality of one other British journalist (bless her) who lent me her flat while she was on holiday) I spent my first few weeks moving from one temporary letting or lodging to another, including one particularly squalid one in a rough eastern district of Moscow.

Each time I moved, I had to shift my single large suitcase, my fax machine, my do-it-yourself telephone engineer’s kit and, after the first week, my gigantic Cyrillic typewriter , essential for official letters. This was done by flagging down a passing car and offering the driver quantities of western cigarettes, before setting off to the next place. My one advantage was that I had a copy of the CIA map of Moscow, the only accurate one in existence as it had been compiled form satellite pictures and was designed for easy use by spies (Cinemas were very well-marked, presumably because, being dark and possessing many entrances, they were ideal spots for shadowy rendezvous)… Don’t ask me how I got it.

But I have no doubt that my possession of this encouraged the KGB to believe that I was a spy myself. Certainly, they had planted an attractive English-speaking woman on the train I took from Ostend to Moscow (I had to notify my exact travel plans to the Soviet Foreign Ministry before setting out), who talked me out of a fix I was in Soviet customs at Brest-Litovsk, and soon afterwards offered to be my fixer and translator at an amazingly modest fee. I had no illusions about what was going on, but, as I wasn’t a spy, I was happy to accept the help for as long as it lasted. She was very efficient, but handicapped by the fact that she was a true believer in the Soviet system and so wouldn’t bribe anyone, or help me do so, which meant that about 80% of the things I wanted to do weren’t possible. As it happened, it ended abruptly a few months later, presumably at the point they decided finally that I was as hopeless as I appeared to be, and not just putting it on.

In the midst of all this I had to work, delivering news stories pretty much daily, and a weekly column on the details of Soviet life. It was one of the most intense periods of learning since I first went to boarding school(and I have always said that, had I not been at boarding school, I could never have coped with the homesickness, the repeated minor blows and setbacks, the solitude and the insecurity).

I have never forgotten a brief visit to my Oxford home, half-way through this process, and being asked for directions by an American tourist . As usual in Oxford, my directions were pretty good, based as they are on decades of intimate knowledge, and the tourist asked me ‘Do you live here, then?’. I had to swallow hard and say ‘No, I live in Moscow, as it happens’. And – this may give some indication of the intensity of being an expatriate – I felt like a traitor as I said it. Years later, when I finally returned home after two stints abroad, and had great difficulty in returning to normal life from the weightless, detached existence of the expatriate I remembered this moment very clearly. There is a kind of violence and loss in expatriating, from which you never completely recover.

I was already becoming a different person, a transient ghost in my own home town (where my house would shortly be rented to strangers and so closed to me, another strange experience) . By my own choice ( and I did not yet know if it was a crazy choice, as the whole mission might yet be an utter failure) I was living a weightless existence as an interloper in someone else’s country, and so turning into an outsider in my own. I cannot tell you how quickly you lose touch with the familiar when you are living abroad - especially when you have decided – as I did – to do it properly, and to come back only seldom, when absolutely necessary.

Moscow was now my home. By a tremendous stroke of good fortune I had by then found a place to live which I still regard as miraculous – a lovely apartment built in the Stalin era for a privileged member of the Communist elite. Here I was truly inside the Belly of the Beast. To live there was an education in itself. I had twelve-foot ceilings, oak parquet floors, chandeliers, tall windows looking out across a delicious curve in the Moscow river on one side, a serene and tranquil study with a view of the whole lovely city – from the University’s Stalin-gothic pinnacles on the Sparrow Hills , down to the golden dome of Ivan the Great’s Bell Tower in the Kremlin - on the other. On the far side of the clean, well-kept courtyard lived the heirs of Leonid Brezhnev, rumoured to occupy a whole floor. Near them, Yuri Andropov (his tenancy commemorated by a plaque near the entrance) had maintained a Moscow apartment for the days he had no time to get to his country house out in the woods where the elite had their true homes.

So, in a few short months I had learned a new language, been knowingly suborned by a spy, experienced the underside of one of the world’s greatest cities, until recently largely closed to foreigners, learned how to bribe officials, uprooted myself from the land of my upbringing and education (though not, oddly enough, of my birth) and discovered the absolute falsehood of the USSR’s claims to be an equal society, by being lapped in greater and more exclusive privilege than I have ever known, before or since.

This sort of thing has many effects (there’s much more I could tell, but no time to tell it) but one of the main ones is that it sets your mind free to think for itself in a way that 50 years of living in the same place will not usually do.

But how do I communicate this intensified and enhanced understanding to others, who have not been so blessed? Last night I was in York , haranguing a mainly student audience on the need to destroy the Conservative Party (the York student Tories, to their credit, kindly organised this event, and were extremely hospitable to me).

One of the things I need to explain is that socialists and communists have not stopped thinking. They have not ignored the failures of the 1917 revolution, nor the dead end of Attlee’s nationalisation programme. They have regrouped, re-examined the battlefield, turned to other things. The fact that your opponent is no longer trying to nationalise industry, and the fact that the old Bolshevik-influenced Communist Parties are one with Nineveh and Tyre, does not mean that the revolutionaries have gone away.

It just means that, following Antonio Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse ( or Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland) they have learned new ways to the old goal of the utopian society. The union barons are a spent force, a stage army of more use to Tory propagandists than to their own side. The battle has shifted into sex, marriage, morality, comedy, drugs, rock and roll, the abolition of personal responsibility, the spread of egalitarian and diversity dogma in schools, the civil service, the law, universities, publishing, broadcasting and the NHS, the anti-Christian frenzy, and the attack on national sovereignty.

The ‘Internationale’, old anthem of Communism, is now just a sentimental recognition of a revolutionary youth. The real anthem of the new revolution is John Lennon’s ghastly ‘Imagine’ , a version of which I heard this morning leaking out of the loudspeakers in my York hotel, part of the background noise of our age, sneaking into our minds as an ear-worm.

And because the Tories barely understood Bolshevism or Fabianism, and have never even begun to grasp the meaning of Gramsci,. Marcuse, Lennon or Jenkins, they are not fit for the fight, and – in some ways worst of all – have mistaken Margaret Thatcher’s Hayekian liberalism for a revival of their beaten cause.

In fact, it was another grave defeat for conservatism – which is actually a happy and free people’s reasonable defence of those things which make them happy – continuity, inheritance, modest but secure private property, limited government, national independence , a life ordered by conscience rather than a police force, and come to that beauty of landscape and architecture. That is why unhappy countries tend not to have much in the way of political conservatism.

My Tory opponent at the York meeting could do little more than regurgitate Central office handouts about deficit reduction (pah!) , mingled with embarrassing and historically inaccurate Thatcherolatry . What was interesting and amusing was that the more competent defence of the Tories was made by a spokesman for the York Labour Party, who repeatedly made it plain that he hoped they would survive, as they were a ‘party with which he could do business’. Well, exactly. Readers of ‘The Cameron Delusion’ will have noticed a similar view expressed by the left-wing pollster Peter Kellner, which I quote there.

Oh, and if any of you really care what I think about Thursday’s election, I urge you above all not to vote Conservative and, if you must vote at all (and why should you? You don’t buy goods you don’t want. Why vote for parties you don’t like and who don’t like you?) , to vote for UKIP, which is a useful weapon against the Tories – even if it has feet of clay and has no long-term future.

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01 March 2006 3:45 PM

A lot of Tories would probably now like a re-run of the election in which they picked David Cameron as their leader without realising that he is, in fact, a supporter of New Labour.

Mr Cameron now plans to offer them just that, a referendum on what he calls his policies. Will Tory Party members take this opportunity - as they should - to hurl Mr Cameron's patronising drivel back into his teeth? I wonder.

The poor things have for years been told to be ashamed of being old, of being unfashionable, of being suburban - of being, in fact, conservative. That is why they are so easily hypnotised by Mr Cameron's youth and Etonian smoothness, and deferential towards Mr Cameron's aristocratic grandeur.

He looks if he has never spent a night in a semi-detached house, or applied for a mortgage. He sounds as if he thinks all state schools are like the picturesque village primaries in the nicer parts of his Oxfordshire constituency. He is equivocal about drugs, a fact people have tended to forget lately. He enjoys films about homosexual cowboys, films that would make most Tory voters hot with embarrassment if they went to see them. Yet they voted for him.

It is only by making Tories ashamed of being themselves, that Mr Cameron's propaganda experts have worked this strange trick. Mr Cameron has almost no experience or knowledge of the real world in which most Tory voters live. He is not old enough, he is too rich to know about the lumpy parts of life in modern Britain, he is infected with the modish opinions of a metropolitan elite.

Some people like to argue that it is so important to vote Labour out of office that we should not care too much about what we put in its place. There are two things wrong with this. One is that the Tory decision to become a Mark Two Labour Party has failed to bring in much of an increase in votes, and won't win an election if the current polls are anything to go by.

The Tories would need to be 15 points ahead now to have a serious chance of forming a government in 2009. The second, and more important point is this. Why waste so much time and energy and hope on electing a government which will be more or less exactly the same as the one we now have? Mr Cameron's 'blueprint for a 'modern compassionate party', was leaked on Tuesday to the left-wing 'Independent' newspaper.

Where it is not so vague as to be meaningless, it is standard post-sixties piety. Even Mr Cameron's supposed support for marriage has been interestingly watered down to support for "families and marriage." I expect that, by manifesto time, it will be just "families" exactly like New Labour.

Like most political manifestoes and speeches, it should be tested by the harsh, clear rules set out by George Orwell 60 years ago in his wonderful essay "Politics and the English Language". Orwell warns against vague, meaningless words, amongst other things.

Strip the vagueness and meaningless words from the Cameron manifesto and there is very little left. But is interesting to see that tax cuts are written off as irresponsible and a likely cause of 'instability'. Yet it is actually Britain's £487 billion annual tax bill which is irresponsible and, if not cut back, likely to destabilise the economy.

Few people realise that only £138 billion of this colossal figure is raised by income tax, and that - thanks to heavy indirect taxes - many households will soon be paying around half their income to the state. Few also realise that welfare payments, many of them wasteful and fraudulent, others actively encouraging social ills such as fatherless families, swallow up £146 billion a year.

There would be much more to spend on the famed 'public services', as well as on defence, transport and combating crime, if only someone would make a serious effort to reduce the grotesque welfare bill. But that needs political will, conservative political will.

Where do Mr Cameron's ideas come from? In the end, they come from the Fabian movement, the socialist society which decided back in the 1890s to infiltrate every part of the establishment, achieving its aim by gradual change rather than by revolution - but getting there all the same. It openly stated that it sought to gain influence in the Tory party, and its ideas are completely accepted in the Tory 'civil service' which makes policy at party HQ, decides what research is done and why, and provides the thinking and the machinery of the party.

Tory conferences and local associations have never had any influence over policy. They were never asked what they thought about Europe, until William Hague's referendum. By then it was far too late, We were already in the Euro-swamp up to our chins. They were never asked about comprehensive schooling, taxation, or anything else.

They were fobbed off with fraudulent speeches by cabinet ministers, promising to be 'tough' on crime or 'tough' in negotiations with Brussels or to go 'back to basics' on issues of family and morality. But all these meant nothing, they were a screen - and behind that screen they carried on pursuing the Fabian agenda they quietly embraced long ago.

Will they get away with it again? Quite possibly. Deference is actually quite a good thing most of the time, and the Tory Party is almost the last place where you will find it. The trouble is that the liberal cynics who have taken over the Tory Party - who loathe deference themselves - are quite prepared to use it to get their way. It would be very good, and very funny, if they failed.